At present, more and more attention is paid to so-called electronic money (“e-money”), which provides an electronic form of monetary liabilities of the issuer and is available to the user on electronic media (e.g., the Internet). Electronic money can be implemented using smart cards, networks or the like. Examples of e-money can be PayPal® or Yandex® money.
More recently, there has been another type of e-money that is called cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a type of e-money that has its emissions and accounting based on cryptographic methods. Cryptocurrencies typically feature decentralized control among its users (as opposed to a centralized electronic money systems, such as PayPal®) and a public ledger which records transactions.
Almost all types of e-money have common features. The main feature includes the use of a so called electronic “wallet”, which is a specialized program developed for storage and exchange of e-money via synchronization with other users or the issuer. Another distinctive attribute can be an electronic exchange where users can exchange their e-money for other types of electronic currency or real money (e.g., fiat money). With regard to cryptocurrency, the term “mining” refers to when a cryptocurrency is generated using a resource-intensive algorithm performing on modern CPUs or GPUs or even Application Specific Integrated Circuit (“ASIC”) boards. In particular, within cryptocurrency systems, the safety, integrity and balance of the ledger are maintained by a community of mutually distrustful parties (i.e., “miners”), who are members of the general public using their computers to help validate and timestamp transactions adding them to the ledger in accordance with a particular timestamping scheme for the cryptocurrency systems.
With the increasing popularity of conducting transactions using e-money, various hackers and the like have started using social engineering methods to steal passwords from wallets or even distribute malicious programs, such as Trojans, to generate cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users. Electronic exchanges have also become the object of attention of scams that try to steal passwords to access both the electronic exchange and the user data stored therein.
Accordingly, there is a need for system and method that provides security for e-money transactions at various stages from the generation of e-money to its exchange.